Sonic Insurgency (SI)

Attuning the senses to who is listening and what is heard not only reveals the sonic ruling order but also insurgent sonic life. Referring to a wide range of activities, sonic insurgency includes both formal militant rebellion against the ruling order and the everyday practices of the sonic otherwise that dominant society finds disagreeable, interruptive, unpalatable, or frightening. Sonic insurgency includes coordinated acts meant to challenge social control such as political address, call-and-response chants, noise strikes, radio jamming, protest songs, and exercising the right to remain silent. At the same time, it refers to those practices and activities not designed to overtly challenge the established order, but that nevertheless risk an agitated response by the state or an individual acting either as a state proxy, a boss, or the police. The postal worker who carries a portable speaker on their route to lessen the tedium. The youth who hides earbuds under their hoodie to tune out authority. The woman of color in public “talking too loudly” on her cellphone who, as Jillian Hernandez notes, is perceived as aesthetically excessive by white supremacist standards. When simply living becomes an act of subversion in itself, everyday sonic practices also function as rebellion, deliberate or not. To the subject living under domination, intentionality and non-intentionality are pointless ends in an abstract binary. Beyond the individual, sonic insurgency includes the sounds that accompany large-scale organized forms of living-as-subversion like cookouts, quinceañeras, birthday parties, block parties, church functions, family reunions, and powwows. As the sonic ruling order fortifies its dominion through the production and enforcement of sonic legal spaces, sonic insurgency reterritorializes public and private life and asserts sonic sovereignty. It is within the convergence of auditory social life, public space, and covert and overt refusals, risks, rebellions, and transgressions that sonic insurgency sounds out.